#8: Reading Butler through Berger with Professor Griselda Pollock

Nancy Spero, Performance, 1990

27 March | 5.00 - 6.30pm | Room 1, LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome!

Guest Seminar from Griselda Pollock, and a Wine Reception

We are delighted to announce that, for our final session of the semester, we have invited Professor Griselda Pollock (School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) to lead us through a reading of Anne Emmanuelle-Berger's The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender (2014). In particular, we will be focusing on the final chapter in Berger's book, 'Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West'. Access to the pdf can be found here. In addition to this, Pollock has provided a reading guide to Berger's work, which can be downloaded here. Pollock's guide provides useful theoretical and historical context to Berger's arguments and her source material, so we recommend reading it alongside the chapter. 

Griselda Pollock is professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art, and has been based at Leeds since 1977. Having trained as an art historian, she also works on film and cultural studies. Known for her work on reshaping art history methodologies to recognise feminist, queer, and postcolonial creative perspectives, Pollock's major publications include Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (1981) and Vision and Difference (1988). Latterly, Pollock has turned to focus on trauma, cultural memory, and representations of the Holocaust. Her most recent publications include: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless Artist in the Theatre of Memory 1941-2 (2018) and Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, ed. with Max Silverman (2013). 

In The Queer Turn in Feminism, Berger re-evaluates the intellectual genealogy of theories of gender, sex, and sexuality in France and the US. Herself writing from a doubly Franco-American perspective, Berger understands contemporary gender theory as a distinctly American production, yet one forged through the importation of 'French thought'. She cites, for example, Butler's use of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida in her formulation of gender performativity. In turn, Berger considers how 'French thought' has been changed through this theatrically inflected conception of gender, spearheaded by Butler. Berger's study has surfaced at a moment in which queer theory has been proclaimed 'dead' by several leading scholars, and in which 'post-feminist' discourse has been gaining critical purchase. Not only does Berger subject these trends to fresh critique, she argues for the intellectual magnanimity of transnational exchange and dialogue. 

'Roxana's Legacy' tackles the historical intersection of the beginnings of feminist thought and of captialism in the West. Berger examines "the forms and effects [...] of this originary 'debt' of Western feminism toward capitalism and bourgeois ideology" (8). In this chapter, Berger compels readers to ask what role the complex transnational evolution of gender theory plays in shaping the historical link between feminism and capitalism. Our session will reflect on the place of Butler's work in this renewed genealogy of gender theory.

Since it's our last session before the Easter vacation, we will be deviating from the norm and hosting a small wine reception, complete with nibbles, after the meeting. Join us for what promises to be a very invigorating discussion!